Paul Mellon's Legacy

The American art collector Paul Mellon did more than anyone to transform attitudes to the artistic heritage of this rainy, cloudy island. In fact, the rain and the clouds were among the things he loved about Britain, to judge from the superbly dismal Constables in his collection.

The remarkable thing about Mellon as a collector was his intellect rather than merely his wallet. He nursed a serious personal view of what is unique and beautiful about British art - seeing the golden age as the 18th century through the Regency period, in other words the era of Hogarth, Stubbs, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Blake, Constable and Turner, all represented here by masterpieces. He even founded and funded his own museum and research centre, the Yale Centre for British Art, in a great modern building by Louis Kahn. I know I have never looked at the history of British art in the same way since seeing paintings like Stubbs' marvellous stripy zebra in the austere setting of Kahn's architecture.

It is amazing now to think it used to be routinely said Britain was a literary, not a visual, nation. It must have been hard to see Britain as visually attractive during the industrial revolution, and one of the scariest things in this show is Turner's view of Leeds, its sky dense with factory smoke. Mellon's imagination preferred to linger in Georgian England among fox-hunting men. Maybe only an American could have seen Britain quite as he saw it, all turf, hounds, and elegant ladies like Reynolds' Mrs Abington. His enthusiasm stopped short when Queen Victoria came to the throne. Maybe Mellon's taste was too good, but this is a convincing march past by Britain's no longer neglected masters.